This tender and heart-warming film is my foreign movie pick-of-the-week.Set in modern-day Paris, it touches delicately on the emerging existential angst of a young pre-teen girl from a wealthy family and the joy of unexpected friendships. Frech movie. English subtitles. Worth seeing…twice!

Renee is the concierge (janitor) of a grande Parisian apartment building and conforms perfectly to the expectations of the residents; she is uncultured, bad-tempered and invisible. But Renee has a secret, her life as concierge is a facade. Behind closed doors she is a connoisseur of literature and the arts and is, in many ways, far more cultured than the wealthy people who employ her.

Paloma is a young girl tired of her mother’s neuroses, her father’s absence, her older sister’s self-centredness and she has decided that, on her twelfth birthday, she is going to kill herself. Paloma says that it is not how you die, but what you are doing when you die that is important; she will be making a movie about life. It is from behind the lens of her camera that she discovers Renee and finds, at last, a friend. Add to the mix the arrival of an elegant Japanese man, a goldfish and Paloma’s beautiful ink drawings which spring to life as line animations, and there is a heart-warming, life-affirming film that makes me wish I was able to read French so that I can go buy the book that inspired it. I loved it!!!! It even has a twist at the end!